Eight

I had this fleeting thought that I would do a blog post count down to the day we leave but I missed nine and I was going to give up but then I thought (fleetingly) I can count down by twos! Why hasn’t NASA thought of that? Their launches would be so much more efficient.

Part of our preparations to leave involve selling much of our stuff. Whitehorse has a buy and sell group on facebook with over 6,000 members. If you have a hot item at a good price, you can often sell it within minutes of posting it.

James was a little confused (enraged) when he saw something belonging to him being exchanged at the door for cash. But he recovered quickly when I handed the cash to him and described the endless possibilities. Now everything has a dollar sign on it. He saw me take down our wedding photo and he couldn’t understand why I wasn’t putting it on the buy and sell. The other day he said, “I drew a picture of Sage but I sold it and bought him this toy instead (he had taped pieces of ripped up paper to a stool. Actually Sage loved it. Very high contrast.)

He may have gotten this idea of down selling from us. We recently sold our Subaru Forester with 112,000 km and bought a Toyota Sienna minivan with 300,000 + km. The back hatch opens with a wire coat hanger and the passenger window will only close if you have four years to watch it millimeter its way up. But the price was right and we bought it from friends and the Subaru car seat situation was functional but would not have impressed any safety boards.

We posted the Subaru one night and had sold it the next day with a little haggling. There’s this bakery/cafe in town called the Chocolate Claim. It sells legendary chocolate cakes for $60 each and when you eat it, you think “I would have paid more.” . We sold the Subaru for some cash and at our request, a Chocolate Claim chocolate cake. You are nothing but a winner when one of these is in your house.

J.D. also posted our office chair on the buy and sell for $50 and told everyone it was a broken time machine. The ad got a lot of traffic but no takers (Happy to entertain y’all but BUY THE CHAIR). So he re-posted it as a boring office chair and it sold very quickly for $30 and a bag of cookies.

Is there always delicious food involved with your buy/sell endeavors? Do you make that a part of the deal? Or are people so enthusiastic about buying your stuff that they bring you food stuffs? Either way, win.